Joshua Mamis Photo
The Long Wharf Theatre received an unexpected tribute to itself from the star of Homeland at its annual gala and silent auction Friday night.
The evening featured a reception at Stage II followed by a performance by the dynamic actor/singer Mandy Patinkin on the Claire Tow “main stage.”
Early in his set to a nearly sold-out audience of regional art patrons, Patinkin revealed that the theater had played a role in launching his outstanding singing career.
Early in his acting life, at a mere 23 years old, he was appearing at the Long Wharf in Michael Cristofer’s The Shadow Box with Geraldine Fitzgerald, when the legendary actress, he said, “gave me a present.” She overheard him singing to himself and suggested he take voice lessons from her vocal coach.
“It started this whole part of my life,” he recounted. That led to a Tony Award for playing Che in Evita and originating the role of Georges Seurat in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Pulitzer-winning Sunday in the Park with George.
It was also a moment filled with meaning for the theater, which has emerged from a crossroads in which it dropped plans for moving downtown in favor of upgrading its mainstage Claire Tow Theater.
To some of us, such a move would not have come without a sense of lost history. During its nearly 50 years the Long Wharf has hosted some historic moments of theater, of which Fitzgerald’s advice to Patinkin is but one small detail of the bigger story: The Shadow Box is one of two shows that premiered at the Long Wharf, before moving to Broadway and winning the Pulitzer.
In the last few decades even causal theater-goers have witnessed numerous theatrical highs, with performances as diverse at Anna Deveare Smith’s one-woman theater reportage Fires in the Mirror to Kathleen Chalfant’s gripping portrayal of a cancer victim in Wit.
These and other great moments in Long Wharf history are absorbed in the bricks and mortar of the theater to some of us. As Yale prof Paul Bloom explains in his work How Pleasure Works, we imbue inanimate objects with a kind of magic when they are touched by celebrities — the jersey worn by Michael Jordan while he was on the dream team is worth far more than the same jersey unpacked, unworn, on a store shelf. The Long Wharf is a richer place for all the amazing moments it has provided to us over the years, and Patinkin’s anecdote reminds us of what we lose when we make such breaks from our past.
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Some of those who came to celebrate the Long Wharf at Friday night’s gala were drawn by Patinkin, some to support a theater that had its share of such moments this season, bookended by two extraordinary works that explored the near-taboo issue of race in America: Satchmo at the Waldorf and Clybourne Park. It was an edgy and risky season, and as such not everything mounted was a critical or popular success.
Nonetheless, as those who came to support the theater realize, it doesn’t take many such unforgettable performances to make their support worthy, and they were once again inadvertently rewarded Friday night. During his opening number, Patinkin spotted an elderly woman in a wheelchair. He gently walked over to, her, gripped the arms of the chair, and sang to her with tender intimacy. Many in the audience knew that the woman was Long Wharf benefactor Claire Tow, for whom the renovated theater was named. It was a stunning and emotion-laden moment for Long Wharf supporters who know her, and another historic moment in the history of a groundbreaking theater.
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Patinkin’s Performance was a master class in what an actor can do with a song to give it new context and meaning. Patinkin likes nothing better than to find oddball material and present it counter-intuitively. He takes pop songs and renders them with Shakespearian seriousness (Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and yes, you read that correctly) and inserts charming nuggets, like “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and “The Hokey Pokey,” into a medley of Yiddish tunes. He enjoys tossing in topical references, name-checking Bernie Madoff as a scam artist in his manic rendering of Meredith Willson’s “Rock Island,” intro to The Music Man, and finding contemporary joy in Yip Harburg’s irreverent gospel-ish satire “The Begat” from Finian’s Rainbow.
Most amazing of all, perhaps, is that after hearing over an hour of Patinkin’s exceptionally powerful yet controlled pyrotechnical voice, you can’t help but be startled that he didn’t even start using his voice as an instrument until he was already an adult, already an actor, and that if it weren’t for the happy accident of having Geraldine Fizgerald overhear him murmuring a song to himself backstage at the very same theater, none of us would have had the opportunity to hear his wonderful interpretations of these songs at all.
